Artificial Intelligence I

Lecturer: Dr M. Jamnik

No. of lectures: 12

Prerequisite courses: Algorithms. In addition the course requires some mathematics, in particular some use of vectors and some calculus. Part IA Natural Sciences Mathematics or equivalent, and Discrete Mathematics, are likely to be helpful although not essential.

This course is a prerequisite for the Part II courses Artificial Intelligence II and Natural Language Processing.

Aims

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to some basic
issues and algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI). The course
approaches AI from an algorithmic, computer science-centric
perspective; relatively little reference is made to the complementary
perspectives developed within psychology, neuroscience or elsewhere.
The course aims to provide some basic tools and algorithms required to
produce AI systems able to exhibit limited human-like abilities,
particularly in the form of problem solving by search, representing
and reasoning with knowledge, planning, and learning.

Lectures

Introduction. What is it that we're studying? Why is
something that looks so easy to do actually so difficult to compute?
Theories and methods: what approaches have been tried? What does
this course cover, and what is left out?

Agents. A unifying view of AI systems. How could we
approach the construction of such a system? How would we judge an AI
system? What should such a system do and how does it interact with
its environment?

Search III. Search in an adversarial environment. Computer
game playing.

Constraint satisfaction problems.

Knowledge representation and reasoning. How can we
represent and deal with commonsense knowledge and other forms of
knowledge? Semantic networks, frames and rules. How can we use
inference in conjunction with a knowledge representation scheme to
perform reasoning about the world and thereby to solve problems?
Inheritance, forward and backward chaining.

Planning. Methods for planning in advance how to solve a
problem. The partial-order planning algorithm.